So you want to play DVDs on your Wii?
Want to watch your favorite DVD movie or television show on your Wii? Well, it's not that difficult. Read on for our handy guide on getting DVDs to play on your Wii.

I'd rather not accelerate the burning out of my Wii DVD drive laser, especially since XBMC is probably a much better solution right now (granted you have an Xbox), but it's nice to see the development of Wii homebrew staying strong.

However, in 2 months the XBMC team is releasing a stable release of XBMC, codenamed 'Atlantis'. XBMC Atlantis will be released on Linux, Mac, Windows and Xbox simultaneously.

Adding a capability to the Wii that was not available prior is still always welcome in my book I am happy for all the people that will take full advantage of this because I know it is something that has been wanted since the system was released.

I'd rather not accelerate the burning out of my Wii DVD drive laser, especially since XBMC is probably a much better solution right now, but it's nice to see the development of Wii homebrew staying strong.

Adding a capability to the Wii that was not available prior is still always welcome in my book

I dunno, most of what I have heard is that the Wii DVD drive is not really meant to constantly read discs for a prolonged period of time, although I have no actual proof (most of what you read on the Internet is just opinion / assumption anyway).

I do have a handful of friends that have had disc reading errors with their Wiis that resulted in them having to send in their systems for repairs. These things happen, however it seems strange that they never included this feature from the beginning if the drive can obviously physically read movie DVDs (according to this piece of homebrew software).

Then again, I guess it would have made no economic sense for them to have manufactured a special DVD drive that would likely cost more for Nintendo and perform worse than one you could pick up at Walmart. I guess they were just looking for ways to cut down the cost of the system, and avoiding paying royalties by adding DVD playback would definitely do that.

I dunno, most of what I have heard is that the Wii DVD drive is not really meant to constantly read discs for a prolonged period of time, although I have no actual proof (most of what you read on the Internet is just opinion / assumption anyway).

I do have a handful of friends that have had disc reading errors with their Wiis that resulted in them having to send in their systems for repairs. These things happen, however it seems strange that they never included this feature from the beginning if the drive can obviously physically read movie DVDs (according to this piece of homebrew software).

Then again, I guess it would have made no economic sense for them to have manufactured a special DVD drive that would likely cost more for Nintendo and perform worse than one you could pick up at Walmart. I guess they were just looking for ways to cut down the cost of the system, and avoiding paying royalties by adding DVD playback would definitely do that.

Quote off Erant on that hackmii link posted
QUOTEThe myth of you being able to ‘burn out’ a DVD laser is pretty much what it says on the tin, a myth. This drive was designed specifically for two things. reading Wii games, and reading DVD-Videos. There are special commands in the drive for doing so. (We use these commands to read these discs without a modchip). So, these drives were designed with reading DVD-Videos in mind. (And even if they wern’t, you’re running the entire drive in spec. I’ve been told these myths came about when people were pot-tuning their PS2s, running them out of spec. Running any piece of hardware beyond the limits that were set for it will break it in the long run)